Guide for dual booting with grub2

I’m trying to dual boot openSUSE and Fedora. Neither will recognize the other. I’m going to have to do this manually, but I know nothing about grub2, only that it’s drastically different from grub. I’ve avoided using it up to now. Will someone direct me to an “easy” guide for this task? I’m grateful. :slight_smile:

Did you try OS prober option in openSUSE ? It should detect fedora

What’s the OS prober option?

Run the command


# os-prober

and post the output.

If working from openSUSE
Simply mount the root partition of Fedora

Then run

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

You can do the same if working from Fedora but mounting openSUSE root

# os-prober
#

Did you try this?

Thanks, but it just added Fedora with an earlier kernel. Right now I have oS installed but not recognized by grub2 and Fedora. You’d think that these two would be more interoperable. :frowning:

It was expected to add kernels from Fedora to openSUSE grub2 boot menu. I do not know what “earlier” in this context means.

If you have different expectation, please explain in more details. “Does not recognize” can be understood very differently.

I think he means earlier as in not the latest kernel. But that doesn’t tally with my findings.

What about if you switch to fedora managing the bootloader? Does it find openSUSE?

Interesting.

Is there anything odd about your setup?

The last Fedora that I tried was Fedora 18, and it found opensuse and opensuse found it. So I’m not sure what is different here.

When there’s an encrypted LVM involved, I do first have to do the cryptsetup and vgchange to make it visible. Apart from that, “os-prober” works.

If it is LVM, Fedora defaults to it
You need lvm2 installed, it should already be, it is for me.

Well, I have the current open Suse managing my GRUB2 setup on this laptop. It is one of my two daily systems, the other being antiX-13. The third system rotates and fedora is ready to go on for a test flight. Any time I do this I install the new distro and instruct it to put GRUB on the root partition of that distro rather than on the MBR. Then when ready I reboot into Suse and as root I issue the command “update-grub.” If sudo were installed the command would be “sudo update-grub.” (Note: the best GRUB2 tutorial I have found is at dedoimedo.com. I believe it is available only in English.)

I previously did this same thing multiple times using Debian stable as my boot managing distribution and it worked this same way. OS-prober should be on by default so unless it has been turned off there should be no need to fool with it. If a given distro has more than one kernel on board then the Grub menu should show an entry for each kernel. If a kernel is not showing up the first thing I might do is check to see if I installed that kernel as I thought I did. (I keep two kernels for each distro. That makes for a longer Grub menu but it provides a fall-back to a known-good kernel.)

GRUB2 always strikes me as over-kill in terms of its complexity for people who run only one distribution or who simply dual-boot with Windows, but for those of us who play with different distributions it is convenient. I do not miss editing menu.lst.

I expected it to find the openSUSE kernel. Instead, it found a previous Fedora kernel. By “does not recognize,” I mean that neither installer detects the other OS. I’m left with no option to boot to the other system.

I chose a standard partition setup. I didn’t want to complicate things. :frowning:

I’m installing the factory openSUSE(M3). Possibly a bug, but I haven’t heard anyone else bring this up.

If you mean managing the bootloader in the initial menu options, no, openSUSE isn’t an option.

Probably not related, but the nouveau driver just doesn’t like my chipset (GeForce 6150). It’s given me all kinds of problems on both systems. Installing nvidia proprietary on Fedora seemed to resolve it there.

I have the GeForce 6150 LE on a box where I have installed 13.1M3. Gnome 3.9.1 seems okay, but KDE did not like it. If I force off desktop effects (by editing “kwinrc”), then KDE is okay with it. I don’t much like desktop effects anyway.

What kernel is Fedora using? If they move to a 3.10 kernel, you might have problems getting the proprietary driver to work.

On my 13.1M3 system, os-prober and grub2-mkconfig are finding opensuse 12.3. I’m not sure what Fedora is doing differently that it is not being found.

Good to know it’s working for you. My chipset might just be dying. I’m looking at replacing it.

What kernel is Fedora using? If they move to a 3.10 kernel, you might have problems getting the proprietary driver to work.

Linux kernel for Fedora is 3.9.9. Is there a proprietary driver for 3.10?

On my 13.1M3 system, os-prober and grub2-mkconfig are finding opensuse 12.3. I’m not sure what Fedora is doing differently that it is not being found.

Are oS 12.3 and 13.1 detected in Fedora?